Evaluation: How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

Within our film as well as being the film title, toast is a recurring image as displayed above. To some extent for us toast represents breakfast, in which the majority of people take part in everyday. Amelia carries out the same routine everyday to the point where her life is almost trivial. Breakfast is a routine based concept, just as Amelia's life is.

Henceforth, i decided to take a play on our film title and use a iconic image relating to toast in itself. This was an original idea of mine, which i wanted produce throughout. My other ideas included quite generic images, but i didn't want to convey anything obvious for it may of come across as somewhat boring. As a result the final product then comes across as a fairly ambiguous portrayal, not necessarily revealing anything about our film on surface value. However after carrying out analysis of other short film posters its clear that a certain mystery within the imagery is necessary and further puts across the image as strikingly peculiar, in which at a film festival people would find most attractive if receiving postcards. So i thought it perhaps would be more effective to create and publish a more artistic yet simplistic representation of our product. I find the image of a Marmite jar to be very relatable yet simple, not too much is happening in the image yet its fairly striking in its originality. I decided to keep the titles to a minimum and only include the existing ones, in that being the film title and the main actress, on the Marmite jar itself. I feel this adds to the realism somewhat, which we wanted to put across as a whole.

The film title allows the audience to easily recognise that toast is a recurring image, in which the audience would most definitely look out for shots where toast is present. This being the case, i feel this postcard simply compliments the reccuring imagery and works in combination with the product itself creating a more dominant image for the audience to remember. As a result, i feel that the postcard compliments the main product, in attracting audiences.  

Film Review

For the film review i decided to approach it with a rather casual, quirky style. I adopted this style from British film magazine Empire, who reviews short art house films as well as mainstream feature films. Knowing that, although not of primary interest, Empire reviews short films, i felt it was appropriate to take into account their critique style.

The review begins with a short synopsis of the film, in which Empire usually involve within their reviewing. This opening has a much more professional take as opposed to the rest of review, to clearly lay out and give the audience short overview of the film. The rest of the interview has a more casual yet intellectual approach. Although a highly commercial publication, Empire is still read by film enthusiasts. Taking the audience into consideration determined my writing style, in that being laidback as whole with serious points at times. The audience in which the review is read by is more or less the same for Toast itself, being a short film in itself attracts a niche audience as such, yet we wanted Toast to be highly relatable to a younger generation which is a fairly large amount. Hence my adaptive style of writing included to compliment the production.
I decided to base my design on the "On Set Preview" section of Empire. This was simply for aesthetic reasons rather than the actual purpose of the section in reality, which previews rather than reviews. The section is fairly small and pushed aside from the main focus of the page. I felt this easily could be conveyed as a short film section. This would come off as a professional look for the audience.

The original article.

My film review.

This is the content of my film review without a template.

Love it or hate it


Amelia Jones is a teenage student. Day to day Amelia carries out her routinized lifestyle, conserving all hedonistic needs to replace them with nothing but a daunting life of academics. As we continue to observe her repetitive work ethic whilst denying all aspects of the typical teenage social life, Amelia finally breaks as a result of this deprivation. However this results in no revelation whatsoever as Amelia continues her trivial life.


Sex, drugs and rock and roll you say? Not quite. Surprisingly this take on teenage life isn’t so typical.  Amelia is so wrapped up in her studies that she pretty much lacks a social life all together. As we follow Amelia around a day to day basis at school and her home it appears that life is all too much for Amelia, resulting in an unsurprising hissy fit. The climax itself seems to be in the last scene, in which Amelia is waking up just as she did in the first, so poor Amelia goes through this every week or so it would seem. This circular narrative takes some thought, perhaps even too much. Toast shows alot of promise however, its realistic shooting and tolerance to choose not to sensationalise the drama of teenage life, but to rather raise the awareness of teenage struggles was a good move by first time director Grace Davis. By playing with the subversive on an overdramatized subject of the teenage, Grace Davis may attract a lot of attention than we first predicted.

The combination of the main product and this text comes within the writing style and layout. This determines and attracts certain audiences, potentially aiming to attract the same audience that Toast itself is being viewed by. By stimulating the correct audience via writing style and layout, the review compliments the main product by attracting audience to watch the film. I somewhat played with the conventions of Empire, reinforcing and reproducing their style with somewhat of a twist, simply to try and make the review as interesting as possible. The progressive nature of the review with a positive conclusion making note of the Directors performance, i feel perhaps will stick in the viewers mind, pushing them to watch our film. This seemingly makes the combination of the review and production an effective one.